4 ms·

What the hell is happening that developers still have the hubris to roll their own secrets manager?

by 2muchcoffeeman 2y ago

Rinzler89 2y ago
Resümee driven engineering?
- exitb 2y ago
  Can't imagine a bigger red flag on a resume.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    >see resume of dude claiming to roll out his own OS instead of using one of the established ones >view it as red flag and throw his resume away >dude is Linus Torvalds
- bayindirh 2y ago
  Sometimes you feel like implementing one will take shorter than configuring one. It's a phase we all go through, but some of us are stuck there forever.
- fragmede 2y ago
  This is the opposite of that. If they had practiced resumé driven development, that NUC would have been an k8s node that had secrets encrypted at-rest on top of FDE.
tajd 2y ago
“Ah I can just roll my own in half an hour!” Says the person with a learning curve ahead of them!
theshrike79 2y ago
"We've got $10M VC money and I've always wanted to try writing a secrets manager"
xyzzy123 2y ago
Lack of senior infra engineer-itis. It's fairly normal not to realise there are entire ecosystems of tools and conventions to solve certain problems if you haven't come across them many times before.
koolba 2y ago
This is not even a secrets manager problem. Those have their place but it’s a different link in the chain, or I guess layer in the onion. The answer to this type of thing is full disk encryption (FDE). There’s zero reason not to have it on every device at the block level. Especially if you’re going to be processing highly sensitive data. You can’t even trust disks to actually delete things anyway. So the only way to be sure that information is not leaked is to prevent it from ever being persisted to disk in plaintext.
michaelt 2y ago
Stage 1: "Things are simple, our only secret is this AWS key, we don't need a secret manager." Stage 2: "For consistency, we'll handle our second and third secrets just like that first secret. Or handle them through our existing configuration management system, with just some minor tweaks." Stage 3: "If we mess up the credentials for these edge devices, the software update, monitoring and remote management features will break and we'll have to recall the devices. We should be very cautious about making any changes." Stage 4: "Even with a secret manager, we'd have to protect the credential used to access the secret manager. Not to mention a long-lived credential to bootstrap new devices, or re-image broken devices in the field. The real solution here is Secure Boot and credentials tied into the TPM. If we want to do this, we'll need a team of six full-time developers and our own custom linux distro" Stage 5: "End-user features and business value are our priority right now, credential rotation is on the schedule for Q3 next year"
- fragmede 2y ago
  Yet the "architect" arguing to use Kubernetes is the one making things more complicated and only doing it for their resume?
  - 2muchcoffeeman 2y ago
    You know what they say. Both can be true.
throwaway20145 2y ago
I have a question about that, for my personal accounts I have created a simple php file that I store locally where I can input one password that I know. Then it gets hashed with a salt + salt based on the website that I use this password at. This hash of 24 chars is my password for that account. I don't trust any of the online password managers. Is this actually safe or not? Note: this is not used for any of my professional work

What the hell is happening that developers still have the hubris to roll their own secrets manager?

Rinzler89 2y ago

Resümee driven engineering?

exitb 2y ago
Can't imagine a bigger red flag on a resume.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  >see resume of dude claiming to roll out his own OS instead of using one of the established ones >view it as red flag and throw his resume away >dude is Linus Torvalds
bayindirh 2y ago
Sometimes you feel like implementing one will take shorter than configuring one. It's a phase we all go through, but some of us are stuck there forever.
fragmede 2y ago
This is the opposite of that. If they had practiced resumé driven development, that NUC would have been an k8s node that had secrets encrypted at-rest on top of FDE.

tajd 2y ago

“Ah I can just roll my own in half an hour!” Says the person with a learning curve ahead of them!

theshrike79 2y ago

"We've got $10M VC money and I've always wanted to try writing a secrets manager"

xyzzy123 2y ago

Lack of senior infra engineer-itis. It's fairly normal not to realise there are entire ecosystems of tools and conventions to solve certain problems if you haven't come across them many times before.

koolba 2y ago

This is not even a secrets manager problem. Those have their place but it’s a different link in the chain, or I guess layer in the onion. The answer to this type of thing is full disk encryption (FDE). There’s zero reason not to have it on every device at the block level. Especially if you’re going to be processing highly sensitive data. You can’t even trust disks to actually delete things anyway. So the only way to be sure that information is not leaked is to prevent it from ever being persisted to disk in plaintext.

michaelt 2y ago

Stage 1: "Things are simple, our only secret is this AWS key, we don't need a secret manager." Stage 2: "For consistency, we'll handle our second and third secrets just like that first secret. Or handle them through our existing configuration management system, with just some minor tweaks." Stage 3: "If we mess up the credentials for these edge devices, the software update, monitoring and remote management features will break and we'll have to recall the devices. We should be very cautious about making any changes." Stage 4: "Even with a secret manager, we'd have to protect the credential used to access the secret manager. Not to mention a long-lived credential to bootstrap new devices, or re-image broken devices in the field. The real solution here is Secure Boot and credentials tied into the TPM. If we want to do this, we'll need a team of six full-time developers and our own custom linux distro" Stage 5: "End-user features and business value are our priority right now, credential rotation is on the schedule for Q3 next year"

fragmede 2y ago
Yet the "architect" arguing to use Kubernetes is the one making things more complicated and only doing it for their resume?
- 2muchcoffeeman 2y ago
  You know what they say. Both can be true.

throwaway20145 2y ago

I have a question about that, for my personal accounts I have created a simple php file that I store locally where I can input one password that I know. Then it gets hashed with a salt + salt based on the website that I use this password at. This hash of 24 chars is my password for that account. I don't trust any of the online password managers. Is this actually safe or not? Note: this is not used for any of my professional work